E-commerce: more customers, faster service
The Gemius E-commerce in Poland 2020 report is now available and contains a lot of interesting conclusions for everyone interested in the evolution of e-commerce. The most important conclusions refer to the increase in the number of online shoppers by as much as 11 pp per year. In 2020, 73% of Polish Internet users buy online and 72% of them choose Polish stores. The criteria for shop selection have not changed. These are: attractive product prices, low delivery costs and positive previous experience with transactions or service.
Conclusions after the COVID-19
The increase in the number of transactions was a challenge for many e-businesses, who were faced with many day-to-day operational challenges and customer service. Have all buyers in this nervous period for e-commerce been served correctly? This question should be asked by everyone, especially since – as Helpscout points out – only 4% of customers report irregularities and complaints related to the purchase. 86% of dissatisfied customers simply will not repeat the purchase. Often unsatisfied customers go one step further and willingly share their bad experiences.
Building trust between an online store and its customers is a lengthy process, and even a few dissatisfied customers on the Internet can have a negative impact on the potential for attracting new buyers.
Take care, build satisfaction, personalise communication
Proper service and communication with the customer helps building loyalty and increase the willingness to re-purchase and even to recommend the store. Automation of service and self-service is a standard today. More and more often, sales are optimized by combining full e-commerce customer support with store software. In e-commerce, every second is worth its weight in gold, which is why we strive to fully automate the handling of purchases.
Customers are used to the self-service and are independent in searching for information about the products and answers to questions about the operation of the e-shop. That is why a properly designed UX and current and completed website is so important. However, self-service has its drawbacks – it creates independent customers who are willing to compare prices and – as it results from the quoted Gemius report – are eager to pick the cheapest offer.
Another group of clients prefer direct contact with the seller and need active, personalized service. This group often contacts the online channels with the shop staff in search for additional information, paying great attention to the response time and the availability of salesmen ready to help. The largest e-commerce players allocate large resources to respond to customer inquiries as quickly as possible (usually within 2 minutes). Customers who have a practically unlimited range of alternatives in choosing a shop, with products only slightly different in price, are particularly impatient and translate the satisfaction of service over loyalty in choosing a shopping destination.
How to meet customer impatience?
The pandemic situation has made it difficult for even the biggest vendors to maintain satisfactory response times. Automation and even chatbots are no longer sufficient. For many years it has been said that the future of customer service in the e-commerce sector is artificial intelligence, which has rarely been taken into account due to high implementation costs, which few in the industry fighting for the best prices could afford. However the combination of AI solutions with self-learning algorithms reduced the cost of customer service support and brought it down to available levels. The AI Busters engine is an excellent example of an intelligent and accessible solution that speeds up the response time up to 10 times, helping to catch the customer and encourage them to go through the purchasing process.
“Easy building the model database, personalized answers and the ability to send suggested response with on-click with AI Busters – these are advantages that will be appreciated by anyone for whom time management and customer satisfaction in e-commerce is important.”
Karol Kowalczyk Co-founder AI Busters